Peeler (12 page)

O’Keefe tried to picture Colbin but couldn’t remember ever meeting him. He was no longer a particular problem for the police, however, because he was a known entity. It was the gunmen about whom they had no knowledge – the young men with no photos or names in a file – they needed to worry about.

Ryan opened a cupboard beneath the bookshelves and took out a bottle of Power’s whiskey. Setting a glass in front of O’Keefe on the desk, Ryan poured out a generous measure and then sat down behind the desk and poured himself one. ‘Sláinte, Sergeant.’ He smiled and raised his glass. O’Keefe half-raised his and drank. Ryan gasped and pursed his lips with the pleasure of the sup. O’Keefe felt the bite at the back of his throat and then the warmth as the whiskey snaked its way into his belly. He said, ‘He’d want to be good, your bookkeeper. What with the troubles ye’ve had.’

During the summer, workers in Ryan’s creamery had demanded better wages. There had been talk of inviting in a trade union to organise a branch. Ryan had refused to countenance his workers joining a syndicate and a short strike had followed, during which the milk and cream had curdled under the warm August sun. In the end, rumour had it that Ryan arranged for some of his pals in the Ballycarleton IRA to speak to the workers. Rumour again: several of these ‘labour negotiators’ had since been employed by Ryan to keep an eye on things. There was nothing like having an army to break your strikes, O’Keefe reflected.

Ryan smiled and waved off the notion of trouble. ‘Nothing really. Bolshevism comes in many guises. Just last week Father McCartney warned of its materialism as a greater threat to holy Mother Church than – ’

‘Republicanism?’

‘I didn’t see you in church, Sergeant O’Keefe.’

‘I wasn’t there. Not safe for us to attend, you may have heard, what with the brave boys of the IRA shooting Peelers on the way into Mass.’

‘Ah Sergeant, you know yerself. There’s a war on. So people tell me.’ He winked at O’Keefe, as if it were all a little joke.

O’Keefe’s face remained blank. It was never the Ryans of the world who mopped up the blood of their dead friends, he thought. Never the well-stuffed likes of Ryan who ended up shot to pieces on a hillside or in a trench, in the blood-dyed sea. He could sense the black numbness on the fringes of his consciousness. He set his whiskey down on the desk.

‘Cornerboys’ revolt, I’ve heard people call it,’ he said, forcing down the blackness, replacing it with a quiet anger that would allow him to do what he had come here to do.

‘Now now, Sergeant. A legitimate army, led by a legiti-mately, democratically elected government.’

‘An army that threatens to shoot priests if they give the holy sacraments to Peelers? Shoots men who survived four years in the trenches in their beds as spies –’

‘Acts of war as carried out by a small army in the face of an enemy with overwhelmingly superior numbers. The Crown has over five thousand of its bullyboys in County Cork, Sergeant, armed to the teeth and well paid for their trouble. Unfortunate things happen, but one can hardly find cause to complain of David attempting to slay Goliath using any means at his disposal. There’s nothing reprehensible in the use of stone and sling, surely?’

‘Maybe to Goliath there was. Had Goliath been going into Mass, unarmed, or was just back from a foreign war, bothering nobody, David would be seen as a murderer, not as a hero.’

The Councillor laughed. ‘Sergeant, you should be a magistrate rather than a policeman.’

‘Crime is crime. Doesn’t matter where a man sits.’

‘At the bench or in a straw lodge, Sergeant?’

O’Keefe shrugged, picked up his glass and drank more whiskey. He was tired of the thrust and parry. Ryan represented an enemy he was coming to hate more each day. Not because of their cause – that of a free, independent Ireland – but because of their methods. He thought of the young woman on the hillside and of Katherine Sheehan, and was certain in his heart he had been right to call on Ryan.

‘So then, Sergeant, I can see you’re not in uniform, so I’m assuming this is a social call of some sort? Some matter for the council perhaps?’

Ryan was still smiling and for a moment O’Keefe wondered if maybe he’d dreamt the whole thing; wondered if his life before the war had been a fabrication, a muddle of dreams and whispered rumours blasted into fact on the beaches and dusty hills of Turkey. Ryan looked for all the world as if he had no shame, as if he thought nothing of what O’Keefe knew of him and had seen; of what Jim Daly and he had done on Ryan’s behalf six years before.

O’Keefe swallowed another sup and looked hard at Ryan. ‘I’ve come to ask you for a favour.’

Ryan continued to smile at him. It was the slick, emotionless smirk of the professional politician. This smile would tell you what you thought you wanted to hear and tell you nothing at the same time. O’Keefe had a flashing memory of a member of the general staff on the deck of the
River Clyde
, grounded off V Beach. A poncing, jumped-up lieutenant-colonel from some big house in Wicklow with that same fucking smile on his face, telling the men of the Royal Dublins and Munsters that the beach was as clear as the water; that Abdul had hit the high road at the first salvo of the accompanying battleships’ big guns the night before. Smiling like Ryan was now.
Clear as the water.
The water didn’t stay clear for long. O’Keefe shoved the memory aside and decided that Ryan was going to help him, one way or another.

‘Well, Sergeant, you know that as an elected representative I am here to serve the people of this district and county to the best –’

‘I know the speech, Mr Ryan. Save it. You remember a woman outside of town, on the Timoleague road, was attacked, three months or so ago? Her name was Katherine Sheehan. She was selling eggs to the barracks in Bandon.’

The man closed his mouth and the smile shifted a little. It was still there, but it had lost some of its sheen. Perhaps, O’Keefe thought, Ryan was thinking of a way he might paint what had happened to the woman as the ‘legitimate act of a legitimate army’. Ryan nodded, taking a cigarette from a silver box on his desk and lighting it. O’Keefe pressed on. ‘Some of your boys didn’t like it –’

‘Now hold on there a tick.’

‘Let me finish.’

‘I have no power over the actions of –’

‘I said let me finish!’ His voice was hard and sharp, and the smile dropped away from Ryan’s face. ‘She was assaulted, probably raped, by some of your mob. Two brothers mainly. One is named William Skelly. The other, we think, is his younger brother Thomas. I don’t know if they were official or not, but they had sanction.’

Ryan pointed at O’Keefe with the lit end of his cigarette. ‘There
was
a boycott on, Sergeant O’Keefe. The woman was defying a Dáil government order. A government which was elected by the people of Ireland, lest you’ve forgotten.’

O’Keefe reached down into his briefcase and withdrew two files, opening the one he had taken from Head Constable Murray’s cabinet. He began to read aloud from the Major’s report: ‘
… infection of wound to left buttock. Patient refused examination of genital area but cursory inspection during cleaning of buttock wound would indicate bruising about and around genitalia, indicating possible sexual assault …
’

Looking up from the page he saw that the smile was back on Ryan’s face. The Councillor took a pull on his cigarette, exhaled and said, ‘An unfortunate event no doubt. Excessive, to be sure. But what exactly do you want from me, Sergeant?’

O’Keefe opened the second file. Bandon barracks had posted it on in response to his query with a handwritten note from the head constable there explaining his reasons for suspecting the Skelly brothers for the assault, along with the information that they were no longer living in the family home. From inside it he removed an old arrest photograph of William Skelly – he had been prosecuted for malicious wounding of livestock in 1913 as a fifteen-year-old – O’Keefe laid it down on Ryan’s desk. He did the same with Thomas Skelly’s; a lad who’d spent more time in Bandon court than he had at school, for various petty offences. The boys in the photos were young men now, respectively twenty-two and nineteen.

‘These two bastards, the Skelly brothers,’ O’Keefe said. ‘I want you to find out where they are and tell me.’

Ryan’s smile stayed locked in place, but the skin on his face had taken on a mottled, angry flush. ‘I have no truck with the IRA, Sergeant. I am an elected representative of the people. And even if I did know who to ask … ’

O’Keefe stood up, taking his briefcase from the floor. ‘Find out where they are and tell me.’

‘Sergeant, I don’t know how you got it into your head that I could help you.’

‘I still have the photographs.’

Ryan looked as though O’Keefe had slapped him. ‘But, Jim … Sergeant Daly said that he’d given them all to me. He …’ Some strength returned to his voice now. ‘Does Daly know you’re here? Does he? He made a promise to me. A gentleman’s promise that I didn’t think he would break.’

‘It was he told me to come to you.’

‘But we had an agreement. I paid –’

‘He told me to tell you all bets were off. Haven’t you heard, Councillor? There’s a war on.’

Ryan slumped down in his chair, hatred in his eyes.

‘You have two days or the
Examiner
gets the photos. Or maybe I’ll just give them to your wife. As an elected representative, you’ll understand the importance of obtaining justice for those of your constituents who’ve been in some way wronged.’

‘Get out of my house, Sergeant.’

‘Two days,’ O’Keefe said and saw himself out.

***

Mathew-Pare and his two men had set up in the servants’ cottage at the back of the stable yard, temporarily displacing two older constables – Dunn and Slainey – who had billeted there since long before it had become necessary. The pair were very put out, having to move into the barracks with the other constables and Tans. They wanted an easy life and had found one, living together in the cottage like an old married couple. They did as little as possible on their patrols, since they were both nearing retirement, leading their escorts of soldiers into the most obscure and IRA-free areas in the district before returning to the cottage where they brewed tea, read day-old copies of the racing papers and played endless games of thirty-five on a low table they placed in front of the turf fire.

There were two beds in the cottage. Mathew-Pare had taken one and his men would sleep end to end in the other. Eakins, the larger of the two, sat down on the bed and said, ‘I’ve slept with uglier cunts, me.’

The second of Mathew-Pare’s men, the lean, knife-faced Starkson, replied, ‘Just keep your paws to yourself, Eako, and mind you don’t eat beans.’ He laughed and took from his bag a Winchester pump-action shotgun with its barrel and stocks cut down.

‘Nice feed of beans and I’ll blow your bones out the rack, Starks,’ Eakins replied.

Mathew-Pare smiled. They were good men. He had served in the trenches with Eakins and had met Starkson on a job in Fallujah. Together they had fixed so many problems that Mathew-Pare couldn’t put faces to most of them now. Sorting out problems for the King was how he viewed his work. Good for King and country. He doubted if Starkson and Eakins thought much about their work at all, but they liked it, wherever it took them. Behind the lines in the shell-pocked towns and villages of France and Belgium. Down fly-blown, labyrinthine streets in Mesopotamia and Egypt, into the stout and smoke-charged backrooms of Dublin. Both were handy with a blade or a gun.

There was a knock on the cottage door. A young constable stood on the doorstep, shifting nervously from foot to foot. ‘Detective Mathew-Pare? There’s a woman and her husband here. The DI, sir, he told me get you.’

Mathew-Pare met the woman and her husband at the gate and had the constable on guard open it to admit them and their cart. The evening air was damp and cold, and the donkey’s breath puffed from its nostrils.

‘Your daughter,’ Mathew-Pare said. ‘You say your daughter’s missing, is she?’

The woman nodded. ‘This last week, sir, she’s missing. She always comes to us on a Sunday and brings us a small something. And Sunday last she didn’t come. And then a young man came, enquiring after her, like. A man says she’s not been in work the week past.’

‘And was this man from her place of work?’ He questioned the couple gently as he led them, taking the ass by its harness into the barracks yard.

‘He didn’t say. But he looked … he didn’t look like a man from the Barton’s Works.’

‘In what way, Mrs …?’

‘Costelloe. My daughter’s name is Deirdre.’

‘Deirdre. Well, I certainly hope the girl we have is not your Deirdre.’ He gave a bland smile, stopping now in front of the cold storage room. ‘You said your daughter worked in the Barton’s factory? Isn’t that in Cork?’

‘She does, sir. She rooms in the city with her friend from home.’

Mathew-Pare noticed her insistence on the present tense. But in her drawn face, and in the bleary, reddened eyes of her silent husband, he saw resignation, as if they had somehow known they would one day find their daughter laid out before they’d the chance to die themselves.

‘Deirdre’s a good girl, sir,’ Mrs Costelloe said. ‘A good girl; always something for us from her packet, each week.’

Mathew-Pare wondered if they would miss their daughter more than the money she brought into the house. Jobs in the Barton and Sons’ plant were hard to come by, he imagined. All jobs in Ireland and Britain were, for that matter. A young girl would hardly leave one unless she had good reason.

‘Of course she is,’ he said, already knowing he had found out who the girl was.

District Inspector Walter Masterson heard the woman’s high, keening wail and opened the steel shutters in his office to look down onto the stable yard. He heard the keening rise and carry, like wind through a gap in a window frame. Watched as Mathew-Pare led the old woman and her husband from the cold storage room back out into the yard, holding the woman by the arm. He felt a vague sense of sadness for the couple’s loss, triggered no doubt by the woman’s keening. It was a sound he had heard any number of times as a child when one of his father’s tenant farmers had passed away. There were women, when he was a boy, who travelled to wakes around the adjoining countryside as paid keeners, hiring out the shrieks of grief that marked the death of a man, a woman, a child. The girl in the shed, Masterson realised for the first time, had been someone’s child. Though so obvious, the realisation struck him like a hammer blow.